Trump threatens food assistance as US government shutdown drags on

Donald Trump, the president of the United States, has claimed that he will only provide low-income Americans with nutrition assistance once the government shutdown is over. He has also allegedly violated two court orders, requiring him to use up emergency funds to keep the food aid program running.

After the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced on October 10&nbsp that it would not be able to fund the program if the shutdown continued, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which serves one in eight Americans each month, was scheduled to end on November 1.

The US government shutdown lasted 35 days, which is the longest in the country’s history.

The federal government was instructed to cover the benefits by using contingency funds, according to separate but identical rulings issued last week by federal judges in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. The Trump administration announced on Monday that it would partially fund the nation’s flagship food aid program, using up to $5 billion in emergency funds, in the wake of the rulings.

The president, however, made an apparent backseat to his administration’s plans on Tuesday, saying he would only fund SNAP once the government reopens.

“SNAP BENEFITS, which increased by $20,000 to $20,000! During Crooked Joe Biden’s disastrous term in office (Due to the fact that they were deliberately distributed to anyone for the asking, rather than just those in need), SNAP! The Radical Left Democrats will only be able to provide this information when they can easily form a government. The president made a statement on Tuesday morning.

The monthly deployment of SNAP, also known as food stamps, costs more than $ 8 billion. A household benefits from receiving an average monthly benefit of $356 in groceries while a person who participates in the program receives an average monthly benefit of about $190. Debit cards typically have the benefits loaded on them.

On Tuesday afternoon, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made an apparent contradiction to the president’s social media post, claiming that the administration is “fully complying with the court order” but that the process will take time to release the funds.

According to Leavitt, “The recipients of these SNAP benefits need to be aware that] this money will take some time to arrive,” By the way, “the president does not want to continue to put money into a contingency fund that isn’t even sufficient to pay for the entire program.”

According to the USDA, one of the judges who initially authorized the administration to fund SNAP would use the contingency funding to pay SNAP recipients 50% of their typical allotment, calling it a “cumbersome process” that would lead to delayed benefits, according to the USDA’s statement on Monday.

In a motion on Tuesday, Democrats Forward’s lawyers told McConnell that the USDA’s statement about delays demonstrated that the administration had made only partial benefits available.

According to the attorneys, “Time is of the essence when it comes to hunger.”

In her news conference on Tuesday, Leavitt asserted that the party is willing to harm the nation in order to gain political points.

With this shutdown, the Democrats are intentionally causing harm to American families, businesses, and workers in an effort to woo their radical left-wing base into offering free healthcare to illegal aliens, she claimed.

Food assistance is a necessity for more than 42 million Americans. The Trump administration had previously stated it would not use emergency funds to support the program prior to being given court orders to do so.

Democrats and Republicans failed to reach a funding bill, which caused the US government to go into shutdown on October 1. Since then, neither party has reached a stopgap funding measure 14 times.

A “clean” continuing resolution that had been approved by the House of Representatives and would have funded the government through November 21 was up for vote on Tuesday, 54-44 in the Senate.

Democrats are attempting to use the spending bill to entangle Republicans over crucial healthcare spending because they are in a minority in both houses of Congress.

Source: Aljazeera